Former Formula 1 driver-turned-pundit Martin Brundle has advised Ferrari to hire Lewis Hamilton a race engineer who had can understand ‘Lewis speak’ for the 2026 season.
Hamilton is braced for the hiring of a new race engineer, after the team’s shock move to shuffle Riccardo Adami out of his role.
The Italian had been race engineer for both Carlos Sainz and Sebastian Vettel before Hamilton, but the pair’s relationship appeared to be under considerable strain.
Some less-than-rosy tones in exchanges between the pair mid-race would have no doubt left the seven-time World Champion further frustrated, amid a horror debut season for the Scuderia.
Hamilton, for the first time in his career, failed to finish on the podium during a season, and became only the seventh Ferrari driver in history to do so.
It was a considerable deflation on a mutual level, with Hamilton appearing withdrawn and unhappy, and the team and its fans bewildered by the poor string of results across the year.
Hamilton was beleagured by an uncompetitive and testy SF-25 challenger, which he struggled to tame for the majority of the season.
Brundle intimated that the decision to remove Adami was inevitable, and added that he was surprised it had not happened already, and advised the Maranello-based squad to be methodical in its choice of who replaces Adami.
“I’m surprised it probably didn’t happen a bit earlier, really, judging by all the things that were going on last year,” he said.
“Lewis needs to go there with a team so that at least they understand ‘Lewis speak’ when he’s inside the car, what it all means, and to interpret what Lewis really needs behind the wheel.
“Just listening to the radio and watching the performance, although they obviously put a varnish on it through last season, something needed to change.”
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